1123 replies to this topic

[Sam.]

does anyone know if the Dungeon Be Gone mod will work with the BG2EE ?

It was in the most recent IE Modding News from PPG.

[Eleima]

I confess, work has been cuckoo crazy on my end, and I haven't kept up to date.  Thanks.

[Vandervecken]

So...

Is BG Enhanced Edition worthwhile?  Does it offer for example any awesome graphical upgrades?  Does it offer any improvements that aren't already handled by the various mods?

 

Thanks,

Vandervecken

[Eleima]

Well, as you can probably gather from reading through this thread, impressions are mixed.  Some people love it, some people don't.  Most mods now are being adapted so they'll work with the EE, and the EE does make running the game in Win 7 or Win 8 easier.  There's extra content, new, sharper videos, characters...  I can't nudge you one way or the other, it's a rather personal decisions, and people having been falling on both sides.

[kreso]

So...

Is BG Enhanced Edition worthwhile?  Does it offer for example any awesome graphical upgrades?  Does it offer any improvements that aren't already handled by the various mods?

 

Thanks,

Vandervecken

For your questions:

1) does it offer awesome graphical upgrades?

No, it does not. If you consider zoom a graphical upgrade (I don't, it's more of an annoyance for me) then yes. Otherwise, it looks as the original BG2 with Widescreen and 1PP mod. And GUI is changed, for better.

2) Other improvements?

Let's begin with "the best thing of EE" - game engine is vastly. greatly improved. Lagging is a thing of history with EE, it works better, faster than the original. Everything seems much more fluid, the colors are sharper etc. Quick-save lasts for 1 second. No more of ugly screen where some bar fills with blue colour while you wait.

If you're into modding, a lot of things are now externalized, which means they can be customized without serious hacks.

Other than that, it's a bit of an "empty shell":

You've got new NPCs, more or less on par with average downloadable NPC mods here or at other forums, probably below level of the very best the community has to offer by now (don't expect to get an emotional rise from any of them), and definitely far below the level of original game NPCs like Minsc, Aerie or similar (I'm not talking about content, but quality here).

New areas are unfortunately, more or less directly linked to new NPCs, so without them those areas will be unreachable. These areas aren't exactly "in line" with BG2 world, quite the opossite - trees are vastly different, coloring used really stands out and similar. Kits & Items - see below.

 

The very worst thing about EE:

Fixpack is made a core part of the install - all the bugs, irrelevant changes, provisionary tweaks - are now implemented as a part of the "unmodded" game. This includes not only "debatable" things like some alignment changes, but real bugs which aren't present if you don't use Fixpack. This may not be a problem for people who never even played vanilla game with only Bioware patch applied, or using non-Weidu Baldurdash fixes, but if you did - you'll see the changes very soon, and if you don't like them, than tough luck.

The first time I installed the game I hand-edited about 15 area scripts, more than several dozen of items and spells just to get rid of the things I find ranging from midly annoying to basically - gamebreaking. 

 For people like me who don't think a Blade bard wearing a Ring of Free Action should be prohibited from using Defensive Spin, that Archers shouldn't wear Ankheg Plate and that 90% alignment changes aren't fixes but tweaks with no consistent proof  this can be either a minor annoyance, or a real pain to handle.

The 2nd worst thing about EE:

Lots of mods are still incompatible, and God knows when and if they will ever be made compatible. 

3rd worst:

Vanilla NPCs in BG1 have no dialogue between them, just like in the original game (few random lines/shouts). Since BG1 NPC project isn't compatible with EE (they say it will be, eventually......) this leaves a very bad taste.

4th worst

New kits. The vanilla game kits aren't optimized for BG1, they never were, yet are more or less left untouched. The new ones are straight out of a comic book. The very least developers could make is check some relevant sources about them (for example, Dwarven Defender kit), and then implement it. The way they're handled is lame, if these kits were released as stand-alone mods very few people would consider playing those.  

5th

It's unfinished work. They couldn't even make 2 games "look" similar, even GUI's are different, icons etc. Hopefully, a new patch will be released soon.

Fwiw, my opinion -  with the mods available today like BG1NPC project, BGT, ToBEx, Ascension etc. original game beats EE any day of the week. Sure, it has it's flaws, it's old, buggy etc. but the love this game got from the community throughout the ages and the ammount of customization it allows imakes it a much better deal than EE. I hope things do change, and EE becomes more popular.

EE iss hastily made, and it could had been much better. Developers focused too much on wrong things (at least NPC mods are in abduance, and new kits can be made far better than this poorly developed ridicules) and too little on making new, quality content, especially ToB part of the game which is poorly developed in the original as well.

[Vandervecken]

Thanks for the info guys.  I'm guessing I'll pass on EE for the time being.

 

Slight detour, since you mentioned lag in BG - I played a MegaMod install in 2009, and did a lot of work on stutter/lag.  My results are in this thread:

http://www.shsforums...ad-please-help/

I found that a large part of it was just a numbers game with the number of global variables in baldur.bcs.  My solution was to trim the BG1 variables that were not needed in BG2.  There were a lot of them.

Has progress been made on stopping stutter in megamods by trimming global variable count?

[The Imp]

Has progress been made on stopping stutter in megamods by trimming global variable count?

Nope. Besides that would just make the game smaller. It's not the variable count that's going to help you in the end, it's going to be the more intelligent checks and that sort of things. So no use of  PartyHasItem("xzy") then response x 1000 stuff END in the baldur.bcs, but in the specific area script etc and other 25 ways to remove the lag-ging.

Yes, I am still here(Jarno Mikkola).

 

Also some of the problems were removed by opting the inventory checks in tobex ... and I believe Ascension64 tweaked the variable setting between the v1.07 and the current v1.18 at somepoint, so you start the SoA game free of the BG1-only variables.

Edited by The Imp, 15 January 2014 - 01:49 PM.

[Vandervecken]

Also some of the problems were removed by opting the inventory checks in tobex ... and I believe Ascension64 tweaked the variable setting between the v1.07 and the current v1.18 at somepoint, so you start the SoA game free of the BG1-only variables.

What exactly does this mean?  I can see I missed a lot.

[The Imp]

What exactly does this mean?  I can see I missed a lot.

One of the scripts in the transition between the talk with Belt and the Irenicus cell removes a lots of chosen journal entries and sets some globals to back zero(amnscene.bcs).

[Suslik]

Thanks for the info guys.  I'm guessing I'll pass on EE for the time being.

 

Slight detour, since you mentioned lag in BG - I played a MegaMod install in 2009, and did a lot of work on stutter/lag.  My results are in this thread:

http://www.shsforums...ad-please-help/

I found that a large part of it was just a numbers game with the number of global variables in baldur.bcs.  My solution was to trim the BG1 variables that were not needed in BG2.  There were a lot of them.

Has progress been made on stopping stutter in megamods by trimming global variable count?

We did some investigation regarding stuttering in infinity engine. The whole thing I attempted and discovered is documented here: http://www.shsforums...e-stuttering/ 

Long story short: there were different kinds of things that caused stuttering such as loopy scripts, a lot of unoptimized inventory checks, etc. But Ascension64 optimized inventory checks, all scripts seemed to be optimized yet sometimes even vanilla game started stuttering. As it turned the most mysterious kind of stuttering happened sooner or later during every playthroug when amount of variables reached about ~2k and regular scripts simply started to execute like 10-100 times slower than they are supposed to. And the reason was a very poor strategy of handling script variables when they reach certain numbers like 1024, 2048 and 4096. So when your game has 2040 variables it starts stuttering horribly. But if you add 10 more this kind of stuttering will disappear. That's what most workarounds do. Ascension64 fixed this properly in TobEx since then and similar fix is included to EE.

 

Bottom line is: it's not the amount of variables that cause stuttering. The engine can easily handle thousands of them. It's poor variable container design that starts working really slow when number of variables approches large power of two numbers like 2048 and 4096. The issues is fixed two years ago with TobEx.

Edited by Suslik, 18 March 2014 - 08:00 AM.

[Vandervecken]

I know it's been a while since you posted on this thread, but Suslik, my hat is off to you.  These days I work on software perf (at the time I didn't) so I can fully appreciate how I was fumbling around int he dark, and you flipped the switch.  Kudos!

[Almateria]

So! Does anyone else find the fact that Beamdog had to release a 36-page pdf file detailing each bug that they themself introduced, while the patch is still in beta, absolutely hilarious?

[Cahir]

Nope, not me. I find it cool, actually

[Mad Mate]

Well, they fixed pathfinding, and that is huge (at least for me).

It is shaping up nice. Bought both EEs, I'm still on BGT, but maybe this time, next year...   

 

I'm just curious, what introduced all those new bugs (engine changes or what).

 

P.S.

Nice pdf 

[The Imp]

It is shaping up nice. Bought both EEs, I'm still on BGT, but maybe this time, next year...   

Well, look up for the EET ... Enhanced Edition Trilogy. The hope is that the v1.3 patch to BG2 will now make it an official news worthy stuff, with an official release. Well, just have to watch and see.

[Eleima]

So! Does anyone else find the fact that Beamdog had to release a 36-page pdf file detailing each bug that they themself introduced, while the patch is still in beta, absolutely hilarious?

I call that transparency.  I think it's a good thing, but maybe my line of work makes me biased in that respect.

[ScuD]

Jarno, I've never seen any official confirmation from anyone on the EET. Did I miss something?

[fearless]

Twitch Steam for #BG2EE 1.3

http://www.beamdog.c...amblog#post0003

 

From 10 AM to 4 PM MST on December 16, 2014

[Almateria]

IMPORTING VARIABLES IN MODS

Got an idea for a mod that spans across multiple games? Simply add the variables you wish to import to VARIMPRT.2da; any imported saved games will carry your variables over into a new game. 

This is a cool and surprisingly not godawful thing though.

[fearless]

Live Now! - Twitch Steam for #BG2EE 1.3

http://www.beamdog.c...amblog#post0003

 

From 10 AM to 4 PM MST on December 16, 2014